A country without direction

A fall and winter of war give way to a spring of uncertainty in new Afghanistan

CHARLES J. HANLEYAssociated Press

Published Sunday, April 07, 2002

KABUL, Afghanistan -- From the moment the first Navy jet catapulted into the night off the deck of the USS Enterprise, laden with bombs for Afghanistan, it was certain the world would change. Now, as the debris and dust of war settle, it is uncertainty that hangs in the air.

Six months later, al-Qaida is down, if not out, and its Taliban protectors are routed. But master terrorist Osama bin Laden and Taliban ally Mullah Mohammed Omar have vanished into the thin air of the Afghan highlands.

A new government rules in Kabul. But it is a weak, unstable coalition, occupying the bureaucracy's offices until June, when Afghans convene a national council, or "loya jirga" -- itself an unpredictable, unwieldy body.

New freedoms walk the capital's streets, in high heels and faces shorn of pious Muslim beards. But freedom, to many, also means license to again produce Afghan opium, and to extort and rob amid a patchwork of police and laws, adding to the nervousness of a population unsure of its future.

A fall and winter of war in Afghanistan has given way to a spring of uncertainty. "The next few months will be an especially fragile period," CIA Director George J. Tenet advised the U.S. Senate.

For Americans and their British allies, the greatest uncertainty is how much longer the war will go on, how many more months their troops will search for any armed Taliban and al-Qaida remnants.

Afghanistan's new leader clearly values having American military power by his side. "I said, 'Go ahead, keep hunting them,'" Hamid Karzai reported of his first meeting with U.S. troops a week ago.

But some in the U.S. Congress are asking the Bush administration about an "exit strategy" for Afghanistan. From the outset, however, U.S. leaders from President Bush downward have warned that the global war on terrorism could take years.

The war that was launched the night of Oct. 7 came just 26 days after hijackers crashed three jetliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington, in a day of monumental horror that took more than 3,000 lives and was blamed on bin Laden's al-Qaida.

For Afghans, it was another chapter in an endless war dating back 23 years. But for the United States it has become the longest combat engagement since Vietnam.

The U.S. casualty rate -- at latest count, 14 dead in hostile situations -- has been remarkably low, in part because of reliance on Afghan allies, in part because the Taliban didn't put up a stiff fight, in part because of the effectiveness of the latest U.S. weaponry and its overwhelming firepower.

Before ground forces even approached the city of Kandahar, for example, U.S. bombing had leveled the mile-square Taliban military base there into a scene of total annihilation.

The Afghan war, from the vantage point of six months, can be seen unfolding in three phases.

In the first, U.S. air power -- fighters off aircraft carriers, cruise missiles launched by other warships, bombers from land bases -- pounded vital sites of the Taliban in a campaign that intensified to 90 sorties a day and at times included giant 15,000-pound bombs called "daisy cutters."

In the climactic second phase, in November, U.S. strategists turned to a ground campaign by northern alliance troops, the Afghan opposition, to dislodge the Taliban from the cities and topple their Islamic extremist government.

The third stage, the "cleanup," has been under way since December in Afghanistan's forbidding mountains, most recently last month in the Shah-e-Kot range, 80 miles south of Kabul. In this phase, the conflict looks more like a traditional, grinding guerrilla war of "search-and-destroy" missions, often led by bearded, civilian-clad U.S. special forces soldiers in speedy Toyota pickup trucks, some adorned with "I Love NY" stickers.

American strategists believe Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in hiding across the border in Pakistan may be planning a comeback guerrilla campaign for the spring. Elite British troops -- 1,700 Royal Marines -- have been flying in to Afghanistan to join the U.S. 101st Airborne Division in follow-up operations. And the U.S. military presence, more than 5,300 soldiers in recent weeks, is taking on a semi-permanent appearance: A gym is being opened at the 101st Airborne's base in Kandahar.

But appearances, in this war, can deceive.

In the 12-day Operation Anaconda in the Shah-e-Kot mountains, what was said to have been an enemy mortar ambush that stalled the U.S.-Afghan offensive, killing an American and three Afghan soldiers, may actually have been fire from a U.S. gunship aircraft, the Pentagon now reports.

In that same operation, U.S. commanders claimed hundreds of al-Qaida or Taliban killed, calling it a major success. But only a few dozen bodies were reported found in sweeps afterward.

Even earlier, in the southwest, the Pentagon announced U.S. special forces raiders had killed or captured dozens of Taliban holdouts in a mountain village. But it emerged that the victims -- including 21 dead, according to witnesses -- were aligned with the pro-U.S. government. That was only one, if the deadliest, of such mistaken raids.

Six months of war have changed more than Afghanistan. The American military has set up in former Soviet territory for the first time, basing ground and air forces in Uzbekistan, an Afghan neighbor to the north. Even more quietly, it is operating out of military bases in Pakistan, whose government reversed years of support for the Taliban to assist the U.S. campaign against the Afghan regime.

Some 60,000 U.S. military personnel are in the region -- from Kuwait to Uzbekistan's Khanabad air base -- supporting the Afghan campaign. Other U.S. troops are participating in yet another, smaller campaign against Muslim separatists in the southern Philippines.

More conventional efforts, by law enforcement agencies, have netted hundreds of suspected associates of the al-Qaida network. The CIA's Tenet reported more than 1,300 in custody in more than 70 countries. Just last week, U.S. officials said one caught in a sweep in Pakistan turned out to be Abu Zubaydah, said to be the highest-ranking al-Qaida leader yet captured.

In any "fourth phase" for Afghanistan, a new Afghan army is supposed to play an important stabilizing role. But that army, projected at 60,000 men, graduated its first 600-soldier battalion from basic training only last week, and it has few uniforms and no payroll for the fighters recruited from tribal militias.

To develop an army and police force "will take a year," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said. "But what do you do in the meantime?"

What you do, say Annan, Afghan leader Karzai and others, is expand the 4,500-member U.N. peacekeeping force now patrolling Kabul, extending its jurisdiction beyond the capital to the rest of the country. "Otherwise we risk a return to violence and conflict." But the peacekeeper proposal is opposed by the U.S. administration.

Violence is already returning, between victorious anti-Taliban factions in northern Afghanistan; against the Pashtun minority in that region; between warlord factions in the eastern city of Khost.

The violence may spread as June draws near and warlords and regional factions contend for control of delegates to the 1,500-member loya jirga. The assembly will choose a new Afghan leadership for 18 months, after which it will convene again, adopt a constitution and arrange elections for a permanent government.

Fear of violence helped keep Afghanistan's former king from his appointed homecoming last month. Mohammad Zaher Shah's return from exile, to formally convoke the loya jirga, has now been reset for April 16. "Inshallah," Afghans say. "God willing."

Unsure about the gunmen along the roads, unclear about who will govern them in the months to come, ordinary Afghans' greatest uncertainty still lies closer to home, in empty pockets and kitchen cupboards.

After a generation of war, dating back to the 1979 Soviet invasion and followed by ferocious factional fighting in the 1990s, the Afghan economy barely survives. Endless city blocks lie in ruin and rubble. Beggars line the streets. A 4-year-long drought is forcing peasants to abandon their land. Most roads are barely passable tracks, and electricity is sporadic to the lucky few who get it. The economic body has no circulatory system: No banks function.

In January, the world's wealthier nations met and pledged $4.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over the next five years. But promises are one thing; the actual flow has been slow.

As deep as its overwhelming poverty is, Afghanistan is rich in one thing: people.

They're mostly uneducated, often unhealthy, but hardly unwilling, as they show every day on the broken roads home from refugee camps in Pakistan, returning now from years of despair at a rate of 8,000 a day. "It is amazing," said Yusuf Hasan, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, which expects to help 1.2 million come home this year.

The spirit shows, too, in the streets and skies of Kabul, where women now flash bright colors beneath half-open "burqa" veils, where teen-age girls again crowd into classrooms, where boys loft their white kites and pigeon fanciers their racing flocks up into the cloudless blue -- all pursuits that were outlawed under the puritanical Taliban.

Six months after American bombs shattered the nighttime peace in Kabul, Kandahar and other Afghan cities, uncertainty still hangs in the air, over the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, over future U.S. military operations, over how to unite Afghanistan's feuding factions for a common purpose.

But hope seems to be gaining ground among ordinary Afghans.

"This is a moment when war may finally be ending in Afghanistan," said Haji Abdul Qayoom, the 80-year-old elder of a southern village.

"We're hopeful there will be peace. We're also thankful to you," he told a foreign visitor. "If you leave now, Afghanistan will die."